Takashi Murakami is a Japanese artist born in 1962 from Tokyo. He studied at the Tokyo University of the Arts. His work includes painting, prints, and sculpture, as well as performance pieces, retail collaborations and animation. His self-described “superflat” style is characterised by bright a bright, Pop art colour palette, manga cartoon influence, and glossy surface treatment. His popular visual motifs include anime characters, smiling flowers, mushrooms, skulls, otaku imagery, and Buddhist iconography. In 2007, his first retrospective was organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
Archives: Artists
A featured artist
Maurizio Cattelan
Maurizio Cattelan is a self-taught artist from Padua, Italy. He began his artistic career making furniture for his apartment, but soon realised he preferred to make sculpture and performance art. Cattelan is one of the best- known Italian artists to emerge internationally in the 1990s. His work challenges contemporary art value systems through irony and humour. Influenced by the anarchism of Dada, Cattelan’s “characters” take on theatrical and absurd appearances. For example, his life-sized representation of the Pope in a prostrate position after being struck by a meteorite, La Nona Ora (the Ninth Hour) subvert the typical representations of the Pope with humour. He refuses to take an ideological stance rather concentrating on representing the complex rules of culture and society.
Harry Callahan
Born in Detroit, Michigan Harry Callahan began his career at Chrysler Motors and briefly studied engineering prior to returning to Chrysler where he joined the employee’s camera club. A self-taught photographer, Callahan pursued his interest with his friend, and later photographer, Todd Webb and he was further inspired by a lecture given by Ansel Adams.
He is recognized for both his work with line and form and light and shadow, both in colour and black and white photography. The subjects of his images were often his wife and daughter, as well as people and places local to him. Despite a very active process and significant number of proof prints and negatives, he produced relatively few finished prints, approximately 6 according to the artist. Callahan was a teacher at two design institutions, first the Institute of Design in Chicago and later at the Rhode Island School of Design. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
On Kawara
On Kawara was born in 1933 in Japan, and has lived in New York since the mid 1960s. An exponent of conceptual art, he is best known for his treatment of the subject of time in his Today and One Million Years series. The Today series began in 1966, and depicts the date of the each painting’s execution. Kawara adheres to strict-self imposed rules in this series, routinely painting the date in white Gill Sans or, later, Futura font and monochromatic background. The location of the artist at the time of execution also determines the language and grammar of the painted date recording. Generally, earlier works contain the most vivid background colours. If Kawara is unable to complete a work before the end of the day, he destroys it. One Million Years, however, is an audio performance piece dating to 1993 in which a daily sequence of dates is read aloud for long periods of time.
Jeff Wall
Jeffrey Wall was born in 1946 in Vancouver, where he lives today. He has an extensive academic background, having studied at the University of British Columbia and the Courtauld Institute, and taught at the University of British Columbia and the European Graduate School. His signature artistic style consists of large-scale cibachrome photographs, lit from behind. His subjects, urban, suburban, and landscape contexts are often given a seemingly photojournalistic treatment. He has received various prizes for his work, including The Paul de Hueck and Norman Walford Career Achievement Award for Art Photography in 2001, the Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography in 2002, the Roswitha Haftmann Prize for the Visual Arts in 2003, and the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2008. Wall is considered an influential figure for the Dusseldorf group artists, including Candida Hofer and Andreas Gursky.
Mike Kelley
Michael Kelley was born in 1952 in Wayne, Michigan, and died in Los Angeles in January 2012. He was educated at the University of Michigan and at the California Institute of the Arts, where he studied under artist John Baldessari. He often experimented with various media, including textiles, collage, performance video, and found objects. He also collaborated with the artists Paul McCarthy and Tony Oursler. One of his most often revisited themes was the issue of social boundaries. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his work 1997 retrospective of his work.
Luc Tuymans
Luc Tuymans’ paintings have a characteristically uneasy style of blurred images in a palette of washed-out pastels, cool greys and flat whites. The reductive colour scheme and out-of-focus figural images reference traces of memory, haunting traumas and serve to be elusive of meaning. The series Diagnostische Blick (1992) based on images taken from a medical handbook capture eerie, dislocated subjects much like frozen images from television screens. Several American films from 2008 including “There Will Be Blood” and “No Country for Old Men” influenced his recent reductive works. His Against the Day I and Against the Day II, a diptych that pictures a gardener digging, captures the effect of pressing pause on a TV remote control. The diversity of Tuymans’ banal subject matter and varied source material drawn from photography, film and television reflect a sense of anxiety and impending doom.
Diane Arbus
Diane Arbus was an American photographer known for her images of unusual figures in society, such as circus performers, dwarfs, giants and transvestites. Born Diane Nemerov in New York City, her parents were wealthy business owners and this sheltered her from the Great Depression.
She married Allan Arbus at the age of eighteen and he shared her interest in photography; they worked together taking photographs for the Nemerov’s business. The couple ran a successful commercial photography business prior to the marriage ending and Diane leaving the commercial business. Working on assignment followed, as did two Guggenheim Fellowships and a teaching career.Her first major exhibition took place at the MOMA in 1967 and as her fame as an artist grew she did less work on assignment. Examples of her most iconic individual photographs include: Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962, A Young Man in Curlers at Home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C. 1966, Boy With a Straw Hat Waiting to March in a Pro-War Parade, N.Y.C. 1967 and Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J. 1967. Arbus was known to have experienced depression and in 1978 she took her own life while living at an Artists Community in New York.
Richard Avedon
Richard Avedon was born in New York City and attended Columbia University for a short time prior to beginning to work as a photographer, first for the Merchant Marines and then as an advertising photographer. He was quickly noticed by Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue Magazine and provided images for both publications prior to becoming a staff photographer exclusively for Vogue.
Well-known campaigns from this period include work for Gianni Versace and a Calvin Klein Jeans campaign featuring a young Brooke Shields. He branched out to include photographs that ranged from the Civil Rights Movements to the Beatles. His work is recognizable by the stark backgrounds and direct approach of the subject towards the camera; his work is often presented in large format. The series and book American West, sometimes regarded as the pinnacle of Avedon’s work, used this large format approach to capture workers, drifters and young residents of the American West. Avedon has been the recipient of several prestigious photography awards and his work has been the subject of exhibitions of major museums, such as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson is widely considered to be the father of photojournalism. As a student, he first studied music before being introduced to painting first by his uncle and later at the Lhote Academy, the studio of the Cubist painter Andre Lhote. This strict training would later help to inform issues he discovered within his own work, but at this time his interests were largely influenced by the Surrealist movement and he socialized in this circle prior to leaving for the University of Cambridge.
A turning point in his development as a photographer came from his meeting Harry Crosby who shared his interest in photography. An intense affair with Crosby’s wife Caresse ensued, but ended following Harry Crosby’s suicide. Cartier-Bresson sought escape ion the Cote d’Ivoire where he contracted a near fatal case of blackwater fever. On his return to France, he was inspired by Martin Munkacsi’s photograph Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika, and gave up painting for photography, using a Leica camera. In the early 1930s Cartier-Bresson met David ‘Chim’ Szymin (Seymour) and Roberta Capa with whom he would found Magnum Photos following service, capture and escape during World War II. His involvement with Magnum Photos took him to India, China and Indonesia and these experiences led to the publication of his book The Decisive Moment . In later life Cartier-Bresson returned to painting, rarely taking out his camera. He passed away in 2004 and is survived by his second wife Martine Franck, also a Magnum Photographer, and their daughter.